Interviews using Poetry. All questions by Aaron Kent. Longlisted for Saboteur Awards 2017.

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Category: Amy Lawless

A halogen moon shakes
with all the words I cannot muster
when asked to describe the weather.

you can’t structure the rain
but you can forecast its downfall,
the moon’s current stage, and cloud coverage.

cats fight in the forest at the
back and I fight internally with the
desire to enunciate grander and grander gestures

before finding myself oblivious to my own inspiration.
Is this the way it always is? Deleting my words
to find new words to delete.

coyotes howl somewhere in a foreign land, and that’s
all I have to tell me the world
doesn’t stop for us

I make a tofu stir fry and watch
the world come to terms with the lack
of summer. Only the cats seem to care for outdoors today

and I guess it’s because
they don’t know you can structure
a sentence, but you can’t structure the rain.

– Aaron Kent

Answer 1

[Sure, Start with Weather]

Listen, I get it. When you don’t know someone, you ask about
the weather. And you want to know if they own any cats, pets,
as this might gauge sanity, ethnographic insights. Sure. It’s Brooklyn.

Weather unremarkable in the part of the year that leaves open talk about
whether the soul is a chemtrail, marble or song. The wind is a feathery tickle.
Playful. I’m putting this into tercets to show that I am social and can mirror

the behavior of others. Survival. Do you get it? When you don’t
know someone you want to behave, notice their moves, at least at first.
Eventually, a true sociopath continues to remain in tercets and twists

that knife so that the other person is misty or even crying and staring at
his marbles. Staring at his life. I won’t ever do that to you, but
now you gotta wonder, right? You’re thinking about things differently now.

And there’s a storm named Irma building in the Atlantic north of the equator.
She’s deciding how much of a little bitch she’s going to be to the Haiti, DR,
and to Cuba. You realize your window’s weather was never the problem.

It was the weather outside of that frame that will fuck you up.
The weather of others. Who’s crazy now? Who’s crazy now?
I deeply admire the trickster coyotes. Coyotes beat humans

at their own games. Ranchers blame all their problems
on coyotes which is totally insane. While they are tricksters,
they’re also small, forty pound dogs. If you watch their playful bows,

leaps, and how they raise their necks up in an arch into the sky to howl,
you might agree that these animals are indeed godlike or even god,
come to teach us a motherfucking lesson. A good lesson we need to learn.

Only solitary coyotes howl. Only the lonely take to the sky
before the moon, bend their bodies to expel all of the air
to talk to the others out in the cool crispy night.